The first thing to know about Aureva in late summer is that the cobbles hold the day's heat. The café where I sat had awnings out, but the far tables still held the warmth. Stirling had picked one for the obvious reason — closer to the bar, closer to the waitress setting down her third cocktail.
I had picked the same row, three tables down, for a less obvious reason. The chair looked at the street at an angle that didn't show where my eyes were going. I had learned, lately, to value angles.
Stirling caught my look and raised her glass. The cocktail was that honey color she keeps swearing off. She tipped it; the bartender tipped hers back. The waitress — Mara something, a regular, used to her — set a napkin down without being asked. Stirling slid a coin under it. The whole thing took less than a breath.
Beyond Stirling's small economy of flirtation, the square smelled of aniseed, dust, and a bakery three streets over. A pigeon landed on the awning, decided the spot was unsuitable, and left. Stirling watched it the way some people watch weather.
I watched the street.
Aureva in late summer was tired and loud in small pockets — a couple outside a tailor's, two cart drivers swearing over a missing bollard, a boy throwing a ball against a wall with the kind of attention that suggested he might one day do it professionally.
So when Quinn Adams turned the corner, I saw her the way you see weather changing on a slow horizon.
She was walking fast — for Quinn — which is to say, not very. To anyone else the pace looked like a stroll. To anyone who had worked the same guild circuit for a decade, it looked like a woman with somewhere to be who refused to give the city the satisfaction of knowing where. Hair tucked in the working knot. Coat buttoned, even in the heat, because you do not sell poison from a coat that looks new. The apothecary was four streets east. She had not got there yet.
Stirling, half as observant as she thinks and twice as she lets on, did not glance up. She knew Quinn was there before I did. She always does. It is one of the more irritating things about being her twin.
I let my eyes move past her. To the tailor's. To the cart drivers. To the boy. I picked up my espresso and held it like a prop.
Quinn did not look at me.
This was wrong.
Quinn Adams looked at everything. You cannot name seven ways to kill a man with ingredients he once used to butter bread without noticing every room you walk into, every back pocket where someone might be reaching. She looked at a café awning the way a surgeon looks at a throat. So when she came down our row without looking, she was working hard to look elsewhere.
Her coat caught the light, the way cloth does when the weaver knew what they were doing. I watched the cloth and not the woman and let the difference feel like a small private victory.
"She's faster than usual," Stirling said. "Two streets ago she was still slow."
"You've been timing her."
"I've been noticing her."
"I've been watching the street, Stirling."
"Same thing." She lifted one shoulder. "It's a small city. Everything is the same thing twice." She sipped. "Three streets now and still slow. Pretending slow. Did you see the wrist?"
I had.
A courier's knot of black silk at her left wrist. A dead-drop acknowledgment. Someone along this street had paid her, before lunch, to carry something to somewhere. Quinn had committed to a job she had not yet picked up.
This was information.
I picked up the espresso again. I did not drink.
The boy caught his ball. The tailor's sign caught the lowering sun and threw the light across Quinn Adams's shoulders as she passed it, and for a quarter of a second her shadow split in two on the warm cobbles.
Stirling set her glass down. "Five paces past us now. Six. Seven."
"Seven what?"
"Paces past us."
I had not counted. I had been watching the shadow.
The shadow went one way. Quinn Adams went the other. I let my eyes stay on the cobbles where her shadow had been. The cobbles were still warm. The shadow was not.
Behind us, at the sixth step past our tables, her boot scuffed lightly against a stone it had no reason to scuff. Her right hand lifted, briefly, as if she were about to turn.
The hand came down. She walked on. The clink of Stirling's glass, set down behind me with intent, was the only sound she made for the rest of the minute.
I did not turn to look after her. Turning would be a kind of answer to a question she had not asked, and I was not in the mood to give answers on a Tuesday afternoon, in a square I had stopped frequenting for exactly this kind of reason.
"She didn't look back," Stirling said.
"I noticed."
"You were watching them."
"For the whole six paces, Stirling."
She tipped her glass toward the apothecary end of the street. Technically the shop four streets east. Also, technically, toward her.
"That's not a woman who is not interested," she said.
"That's a woman interested and pretending she is not — worse — which I am choosing, for the third time this week, to ignore."
"For the third time this week, Scarlett."
"Stirling."
"Scarlett."
We sat with that. The square emptied. The tailor's shutters went halfway down.
I did not look at the apothecary end of the street again. I did, once, look at the cobbles where her shadow had been. The shadow was still gone.
I set the espresso down. I picked up my coat.
"If you are going to follow her," Stirling said, "I am not coming."
"I am not following her."
"You are walking the long way to the guild hall."
"The long way is the long way."
"The same long way as last week."
She raised her honey drink. She did not need to look at me. She had been watching the street.
I left a coin under the saucer. The waitress took it before my hand had cleared the table. The gesture of that is something I will think about tonight, when I am not sleeping.
I walked the long way to the guild hall. The long way passed the apothecary four streets east. I had not planned it that way. I had, in fact, planned it entirely that way.
The brass door was closed. The conical jars in the window glowed with a small steady flame, the colour of weak tea. Quinn Adams had gotten home before me. She always did. It was one of the things I had stopped pretending was a coincidence.
I stood on the cobbles across the narrow lane and gave her, I thought, the same six steps she had given me, an hour earlier, on a street I would not look down tomorrow.
The light inside went out.
I walked on.
